As we approach the beginnings of the Impeachment Trial there are reports that some Democrats are considering calling the GOP’s bluff and having Hunter Biden testify in exchange for John Bolton.
On Monday, the Washington Post‘s Robert Costa reported that some Democrats are warming up to the idea of allowing Republicans to call Hunter Biden to testify in the impeachment trial in exchange for witnesses of their own — believing that Republicans are bluffing and would get very little out of such a deal:
This echoes the theory of some other pundits like CNN’s Michael Smerconish, who has argued the American people would be unimpressed with the GOP’s demonization of the younger Biden and would focus more starkly on the case against President Donald Trump.
The point here is that the conspiracy theories about Joe Biden are all, in fact, false and his testimony will not generate an “alibi” for Trump that the GOP hopes, while there’s basically nothing that Bolton could say that might be good for Donald John Trump.
From the testimony, we’ve already received from Fiona Hill and Lt. Col Vindman we know that Bolton was aware fo the “drug deal” that Soldland and Mulvaney were trying to pull on Ukraine and that he greatly disapproved. Mulvaney himself has already confessed about why and how the financial aid to Ukraine was withheld; “Get over it.”
"That's why we held up the money," Mulvaney said after listing the 2016-related investigation and Trump's broader concerns about corruption in Ukraine.
After weeks during which Trump denied the existence of any political quid pro quo in his withholding of security aid to Ukraine, Mulvaney confirmed the existence of a quid pro quo and offered this retort: "Get over it."
"We do that all the time with foreign policy," Mulvaney said of the influence of politics in the Trump administration.
Due to emails released via FOIA we know that the Pentagon was in a pitched battle with OMB to have the aide released and was complaining about it being held without explanation.
For weeks, officials at the Office of Management and Budget ignored warnings from the Department of Defense that placing a hold on a congressionally appropriated $391 million military-aid package to Ukraine violated the law, according to new unredacted emails obtained by Just Security and published Thursday.
[…]
The unredacted emails published by Just Security revealed that between June and September — when the aid was ultimately released following an anonymous whistleblower's complaint — the Defense Department repeatedly asked the OMB why the military aid was being held up.
Crucially, the department warned several times that continuing to withhold the aid violated the Impoundment Control Act, which stipulates that if the federal funds are not spent on their designated purpose within a certain period, they will be taken, or impounded, by the Treasury Department.
On top of that, the GAO also determined that withholding this aid was illegal.
The Trump administration broke the law by withholding congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine last summer “for a policy reason,” a top government watchdog said Thursday in a scathing report.
The Government Accountability Office’s report came a day after the House of Representatives sent articles of its impeachment of President Donald Trump to the Senate for conduct related to holding back that aid.
Trump refused to release the funds to Ukraine at the same time he was pressuring that country’s new president to announce investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden and of Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukraine gas company. Joe Biden is the current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The funds were only released after the block on the aid became publicly known, sparking the congressional probe which led to the Republican president’s impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House.
Unless they perjure themselves, there’s little that they can say to disprove that the blocking of the aid was illegal, there’s little that they can say to disprove that Trump made the demands of President Zelensky since it’s clearly noted in black and white within the phone call memo, and also that the Trump defense team essentially stipulates that he did make the demand as he’s been accused.
The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.
[...]
The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.
We don’t need Lev Parnas to prove this, it’s already proven. Parnas makes it clear that “Trump knew everything” and also that Pence and Bill Barr were in the loop also.
Having Bolton and Mulvayney testify - with executive privilege waived - would add more to the case, but the essentials are already there. On the other side having the Biden’s testify doesn’t provide the defense that Trump thinks it does largely because, for starters, there was no “prosecution and investigation” in place when Joe Biden pushed to have Viktor Shokin removed. In fact, the very problem was the fact that Shokin was ignoring the prosecution of corruption.
The wild conspiracy theory on which Trump based his assertion – that Joe Biden had Shokin removed to stop him investigating wrongdoing in his son’s gas company – has already been widely debunked.
Put simply, the chronology doesn’t work – the investigation into Burisma, where Hunter worked, was dormant by the time Shokin was pushed out. It would also represent a major historical anomaly. During Shokin’s 13 months in office, not one major figure was convicted. No oligarch. No politician. No ranking bureaucrat. It would appear unlikely he was in the middle of breaking the habit with the Bidens.
The very initial charge against the Biden’s is not the case. They did not “stop a prosecution” because there wasn’t one at the time. Removing Shokin actually caused the investigation of Burisma to be revived, although it’s back on hold now.
Ukraine’s new Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka told reporters on Friday that he was “auditing” cases handled by previous prosecutors, including those related to Burisma, but he insisted that the investigation in Ukraine should be “independent from politics.”
At a news conference he said, somewhat coyly, “the key words were not Biden and not Burisma," the question was whether investigations were closed by previous prosecutors as part of what amount to corrupt proceedings. In the array of cases to be looked at, he would say only that "Burisma" and "Biden" might figure.
Secondly, the argument that Biden had “no business” working for Burisma in the first place is also not the case. He had previously been a member of the board for Amtrak, and had an unpaid position on the board for an investment firm BHR. At the time that he was offered the position on Burisma board, he was working as their attorney with the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
In April 2014, Hunter was asked to join the board of Burisma, the largest independent natural gas producer in Ukraine. At the time, Hunter was of counsel with Boies Schiller Flexner LLP [fn 1] (“Boies Schiller”), a major U.S. law firm, and was advising Burisma on its corporate reform initiatives, an important aspect of fueling Burisma’s international growth and diversity. Vibrant energy production, particularly natural gas, was central to Ukraine’s independence and to stemming the tide of Vladimir Putin’s attack on the principles of a democratic Europe.
To further its goals of independence, Burisma sought to adopt standards and practices traditionally employed by Western companies. At Hunter’s urging, Boies Schiller engaged Nardello & Co., a leading global investigative firm, to assess, among other things, Burisma’s corporate structure and governance practices. Burisma agreed to pay the legal expenses of Boies Schiller to support Hunter in developing corporate reform initiatives.
Because of Burisma’s stated commitment to corporate best practices, it was able to attract well-qualified board members, including the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, a leading advocate of democratic principles in the region. President Kwasniewski, familiar with Hunter’s work on behalf of Burisma, recommended that Hunter join the board.
Prior to this position, Biden had started another investment firm Paradigm Global Advisors where he earned a salary of $1.2 million per year, which is over twice what he later earned with Burisma at $50,000 per month.
Questioning Biden about all this is not going to produce the results that Trump expects because his view is based on a crazed conspiracy theory. Hunter Biden is a graduate of Georgetown and Yale Law School, he was fully qualified for this position.
Further, in exchange for Parnas (“it was never about corruption, it was always about Biden), I would offer up Crowdstrike founder Dimitri Alperovitch for testimony, who as it happens, is an American citizen who was born in Moscow, Russia not Ukraine as noted by CNN’s fact-check.
CrowdStrike
Trump said that Democrats gave a computer server that was hacked in 2016 to "a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian."
Facts First:
The cybersecurity company that investigated the hack, CrowdStrike, is a publicly traded American company co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, an American citizen who was born in Russia, not Ukraine. Regardless, such firms do not typically take possession of physical servers to conduct their analysis.
Asked if he is sure the Democrats gave the server to Ukraine, Trump did not cite any specific evidence. He said, "That's what the word is."
The DNC email server that Trump thinks is in the possession fo Crowdstrike, in Ukraine, was actually a largely cloud-based system of 140 servers that were never moved. Crowdstrike reviewed digital copies of the servers, and those same digital copies were turned over to the FBI to determine that it was Russia, not Ukraine, that hacked into the DNC.
The “server” Trump is obsessed with is actually 140 servers, most of them cloud-based, which the DNC was forced to decommission in June 2016 while trying to rid its network of the Russian GRU officers working to help Trump win the election, according to the figures in the DNC’s civil lawsuit against Russia and the Trump campaign. Another 180 desktop and laptop computers were also swapped out as the DNC raced to get the organization back on its feet and free of Putin’s surveillance.
But despite Trump’s repeated feverish claims to the contrary, no machines are actually missing.
There is in fact, nothing to lose by having the Bidens and Alperovitch testify as to whether there was any legitimacy to Trump's demand for investigations from Zelensky, which there wasn’t, in exchange for Bolton, Mulvaney and Parnas.
There is no downside here.
It’s a win-win-win situation.